From fortune-telling to identification of prospects: how to define future needs in qualified personnel

Abstract

Increasingly, teachers, employers, students and their families talk about the importance of identifying promising areas of education, of giving him the ability to meet the strategic needs of the growing and changing economy, a dynamic society. We need to understand a feasibility of such a task, possibility to identify future needs for skilled workers, availability of a chance to develop an approach that is applicable in different circumstances. We proceed from the assumption that the flexibility of demand in the labor market doesn’t allow to predict a high degree of accuracy the structure of the economy's needs in the workforce. However, this problem can be seen not only in quantitative terms, but above all with the content, i.e. answering the question, what should be the content of a student training. The value of this perspective is obvious: the huge resources are concentrated in education, at the same time the rapidly changing economic life requires constant updating of the trainings’ content as well as approaches to their organization. In this case, as is known, changes in any system are impossible as long as the goal remains undefined and is not accepted by the key actors. The paper considers a number of challenges currently facing higher education and discusses methodological approaches to determining the future directions of its development.